Realities of resilience in practice: lessons learnt through a pilot EU Aid Volunteer Initiative

Abstract

Humanitarian and development practitioners and donors increasingly regard resilience as a central objective and a fundamental facet of the development path of communities and countries. Between 2012 and 2013, a consortium of European non-governmental organisations set out to strengthen local capacities for enhancing resilience in eight disaster-prone countries: a European Union Aid Volunteers Pilot project lead by the Inter-Church Organisation for Development Cooperation (ICCO). Since resilience is increasingly becoming a central focus of aid organisations, the article aims to share lessons that were learnt through this project. The first lesson learnt is that multiple interpretations of resilience are being used. This causes confusion amongst practitioners and can result in resilience becoming an empty concept. The second lesson relates to the potential that ‘resilience approaches’ have to bridge different working fields, where segregated policy and funding architecture and a lack of unified tools often impede integration. Thirdly, the motivation behind adopting a ‘resilience approach’ was at times found to be questionable. Fourthly, the cases from the eight countries show gaps in organisational and community knowledge, skills, capacities and resources that can hinder enhancing resilience. These gaps signal the need for institutional and governmental commitment and for organisations to network and form partnerships with others.

Keywords:

• Resilience
• resilience approach
• (local) NGOs
• practice
• lessons learnt

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The term ‘advisor volunteers’ was used in the EUAVP-ICCO Cooperation pilot programme to reflect the fact that persons with expertise supported local NGOs as advisors, in a setting of voluntary deployment. They had relevant academic backgrounds and a certain amount of work experience in humanitarian and/or development fields.

2. For a more detailed description of the cases, see the EUAVP-ICCO Cooperation brochure (ICCO Cooperation and de Milliano, 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission, DG ECHO under the grant number [ECHO/EVHA/BUD/2012/01003].